Minecraft has cemented its place in the hearts of many with its unique take on what an open-world game truly means. That said, Minecraft is a game that allows you to explore the world at your own pace. But, there are no set-stone rules for progressing through the game and ultimately defeating the Ender Dragon.
Therefore, we’ve concocted the Ultimate Minecraft Progression guide for you. By giving it a readthrough, you’ll be able to survive your first night, set your base up, and ultimately take down the Ender Dragon in spectacular fashion!
Reaching The End Goal In Minecraft
In the olden days, there was much debate about what was considered the End in Minecraft. Some thought it was acquiring a full Diamond set, while others presumed it was building the best base possible. But, with the introduction of the Ender Dragon, it was quite clear that the way to beat Minecraft was to take down the Ender Dragon.
Note: This guide assumes that you’ll be playing the game in Hard Mode. If not, all these methods still apply. Albeit, you’ll be able to do them with much less difficulty.
Surviving The First Night
Alright, so we’ve just set foot in the world of Minecraft. What’s the first thing we should do? Well, simple. You need to start looking for a tree and chop it down with your bare hands. After doing so, get a crafting table up and ready.
Once you’ve placed it at a reasonable spot, get some more wood by crafting a wooden axe and then craft the rest of your arsenal i.e a wooden pickaxe and sword. Once our tools are sorted, the next issue we need to resolve is our rapidly depleting hunger bar. For that, grab as much food as possible. While apples are a viable food source, you might need to get your hands dirty by slaughtering some chickens, cows or pigs nearby.
As soon as you get these essentials, start digging down for a few blocks using your wooden pickaxe. Once you do, dig a 4×4 hole around you and use the cobblestone you’ve just acquired to craft a furnace. Now, place all the raw food you’ve gathered into the furnace and use the wooden planks to cook it.
After you’ve done all this, you only need to wait for the sun to come up! To check, dig a 1 block hole to poke your way out and look for signs of light. If you don’t close the hole and retreat to your newly constructed cave.
A Miner’s Day Out
As soon as you hit Day 2, immediately leave your cave (don’t forget to mark its location with a dirt block) and grab as much food as you can along the way. After you have at least 4-5 days’ worth of food (about 30-35 raw pieces of meat), you’ll need to start finding sheep.
Since you don’t have shears yet, you’ll need to kill the sheep to get some wool off. Wool will remain an integral resource when fighting the Ender Dragon. Therefore, try to snag as much of it as you can. Moreover, before you head back, grab some wood along the way.
The Scouting Begins
Now that we’ve gathered the essential supplies, it’s time to go deep underground. Generally, digging down yourself also works – until you fall into the lava, of course – you’ll find much greater success in finding ores by finding a ravine or cave system.
While locating a cave can feel quite difficult at first, after a bit of scouting, you’ll be able to find an opening or some sort of indicator that will lead you straight underground. This, in turn, will save you from mining down manually and will also allow you to score some coal which is extremely useful for both cooking and crafting torches so you can see where you are going.
Mining Ahoy!
Your primary goal is to prepare yourself for your journey to the Nether. While you can spend your merry time trying to get a full diamond set, that’s not needed when killing the Ender Dragon. Therefore, we’ll go for the bare minimum.
You are going to need exactly 24 iron ore to craft a complete set of iron armor. You’ll be able to find iron loitered around in relative abundance, especially if you’ve been lucky enough to find a cave system. After you’ve got your iron armor, you’ll need to craft an iron pickaxe.
Now, you’ll need to dig down to about to y -50 to -64 (you can see what layer you are at by pressing F3). As you might’ve guessed already, we’ll need to get our hands on a few diamonds. To beat the Ender Dragon, we’ll already need three.
The Nether Awaits
After we get our hands on the diamonds and craft our diamond pickaxe, all we need to do now is find some obsidian. You must’ve found plenty of it when looking for diamonds. You’ll need at least 10 obsidian to make a nether portal. After that, find some gravel and keep using your shovel / bare hands to break it down and place it again until you find some flint.
Now, all you need to do is make a nether portal in the above form, craft flint and steel, light the portal up, and head straight inside.
Hitting The Fortress
Once you’ve entered the eerie dimension that is the nether, you’ll be met with many Zombie Pigmen. Do not hit them under any circumstances, as they remain passive unless you attack them first. Your main job in the nether is to try and find a fortress as quickly as possible.
While these can spawn randomly, they tend to spawn in the positive x-axis. Therefore, you’ll increase your chances of finding them by moving either West or North. You can also increase your render distance to see further, helping you spot the fortress quickly.
Once you find a large fortress made up of dark red nether brick, you’ve found your stronghold. Now, enter with caution. Your primary goal in the fortress is to collect at least 10 blaze rods dropped from blazes found in the nether. You’ll be able to find two blaze spawners in each fortress. We recommend destroying one of them with your pickaxe and farming the remaining one until you get the required amount of blaze rods.
While you can craft potions of fire resistance to help you move further in the nether, for now, to beat the Ender Dragon, you’ve got what you needed and you can move back to the overworld.
The Stronghold Awaits
Once you are in the overworld, we recommend stocking back up on supplies and collecting more wool if you haven’t earlier. Moreover, take down the spiders and try to get as many feathers as you can to craft a bow and a least 30-40 arrows.
As soon as you have these materials, you’ll need to wait for night to fall. Once it does, move your way towards dimmer areas and kill as many endermen as you can. You must have at least 10-12 ender pearls for safe measure to get to the End dimension. Sometimes, if you aren’t lucky, this process can take 1-2 nights.
The End Is Near
Now that you have your ender pearls, craft eyes of ender by using the crafting recipe shown. Once you do so, throw one of your eyes of ender by right-clicking. Now, you should see them fly up into the air. Carefully follow its path and pick the eye up when it falls. Keep doing so until the eye drops where you throw it.
Once that happens, you’ve found a stronghold! Well, you are standing right on top of one. While digging down may be your first instinct, there’s a high chance you will fall into a pit of lava. Therefore, dig down in a spiral/staircase fashion and land near an incomplete end portal.
Now, place the eye of ender in the incomplete spots, and you should activate the End portal immediately!
Getting Ready For The End
Now that we’ve got our portal set up, before you jump in, here’s the bare minimum in terms of supplies and materials that you’ll need to defeat the Ender Dragon:
 | 15 |
 | 35 |
 | 128 |
 | 20 |
 | 1 |
Once you’ve gathered all these supplies, it is time to jump into the portal and get rid of the Ender Dragon once and for all!
Killing The Ender Dragon
Now that we’ve finally reached the Ender Dragon, you can’t deal any real damage to him before we take down his healing crystals. There are two particular methods you can use to do just that:
- Shooting Them Down: If you have good aim and can stand still as you try to take down each healing crystal, shooting them down with bows and arrows is your best bet.
- Up Close And Personal: If aiming isn’t your thing, manually climbing up using cobblestones is your next best option. However, once you hit the Enhealing crystal, beware of its explosion. While it doesn’t damage much, it can knock you back quite far. Therefore, you’ll need to use a water bucket and keep spam clicking toward the ground as you fall in order not to take any fall damage.
After you’ve taken down the healing crystals, now comes the tricky part: using beds. Now, wait for a second; why does the mighty Ender Dragon even take damage from beds? Well, just like the nether, the End is another dimension where placing beds has them explode.
Related: How Many Blocks Are In Minecraft?
So, we can capitalize on this mechanic to our advantage and deal massive amounts of damage to the Ender Dragon by placing beds right at the exact moment when it can deal explosive damage.
The Bed Technique
To kill the Ender Dragon using beds after taking down the healing crystals, go right to the center of the Ender Dragon’s resting place. Once there, place two cobblestone blocks above the outer boundary of the bedrock shrine. Now, wait patiently.
If you’ve taken down all the crystals, the Ender Dragon will eventually move downwards to attack. You. First, start off by hitting it with your sword, this should deal a lot of damage. Once it starts flying off, place a bed on the cobblestone blocks you placed earlier and destroy it immediately.
If done correctly, you’ll only need to do this for two cycles (two beds), and you should be able to take down the Ender Dragon quite easily!
Alternative Method
If beds simply aren’t your thing, no worries. While this method will take a lot more time and is a bit riskier, it is also a great way to get rid of the Ender Dragon. For it, you’ll need a lot more arrows.
All you need to do is hit the Ender Dragon with arrows whenever he leaves you. Then, whenever he comes closer to the center, hit him with your sword until he flies off. After enough hits, you can eventually take the feisty dragon down.
That’s everything you need to know about progressing in Minecraft. Credits go to the Minecraft Wiki for helping us out with the images. Good luck, Steve!